On a conventional Ethernet, a receiver of a receiving apparatus receives, through an Ethernet interface, data that is sent by a sender of a sending apparatus through an Ethernet interface. The receiving apparatus may be a router. The sending apparatus may also be a router. Specifically, the Ethernet interface of the sender may send P data streams through P physical lanes (physical lane, PL for short), where P is a positive integer. The P physical lanes may correspond to P serializers/deserializers (serializer/deserializer, serdes for short). The sender drives, by using a clock, the Ethernet interface of the sender to send the P data streams. After receiving the P data streams through the P physical lanes, the receiver needs to process the P data streams on the P physical lanes by using a clock, for example, processing the P data streams by using a clock data recovery (clock data recovery, CDR for short) circuit. The processed P data streams have a same frequency. Further, the receiving apparatus performs subsequent processing on the processed P data streams. Data streams received by the receiver are sent by a same sender (namely, a same source) through an Ethernet interface under driving of a same clock (namely, a same frequency), and the foregoing data streams may be referred to as single-source intra-frequency data streams.
With development of Ethernet technologies, there may be data streams of different sources and different frequencies. That is, different senders separately drive different Ethernet interfaces by using different clocks to send data streams. How to process data streams that are sent by different senders (different sources) and use different clocks (different frequencies) is a problem that need to be solved.